Individuals with visual or hearing impairments may have a more difficult time making telephone calls than persons without such impairments. For example, a person with a hearing impairment may not be able to use a common telephone because he or she cannot hear the called person. Similarly, if a person with a visual impairment wishes to surf the Internet, he or she may not be able to surf the Internet in a traditional fashion that relies on purely visual queues. Various technologies have emerged to help reduce or eliminate any such difficulties associated with routing telephony or Internet-related applications.
An exemplary technology utilizes a teletype (TTY) device to facilitate a phone call. This technology involves a hardware device to be used in connection with a standard telephone whereby a user keys-in words to convey. The call would be initiated by keying in a 1-800 number, for example, that connects to one of a group of call centers. A physical person, or agent, then serves as an intermediary between the calling person and the called person. The agent will orate typed messages from the caller and key-in voice messages received from the called party.
This scheme, however, does not take into consideration who will facilitate the call. A Spanish-speaking person may be routed to a call center and then randomly assigned to a person who cannot speak Spanish. Prior art technologies have attempted to satisfy technological and consumer demands to date, but the ever-growing needs of tomorrow will render many systems obsolete. The current state of the art does not enable an individual agent to be identified to facilitate a call.
The FCC implements several requirements to ensure that the service rendered to those with visual, hearing, or other impairments will be offered a level of service commensurate to others without those impairments. One such set of requirements includes the average speed of answer (ASA) requirements. Typically these requirements dictate that a communications agent must answer an in-bound call within 3.3 seconds.
Beyond FCC requirements, providing a high level of service to those that desire it offers unquantifiable advantages to those individuals and society as a whole. New technological innovations such as video relay, Internet relay, and incorporating SS7 signaling into a TTY-type network is desirous. The systems of today wait to make call-routing decisions until after the call arrives at a call center. Once the call arrives at the call center, no intelligence is provided to determine the best agent to receive the call. The status of agents and other resources are not monitored by other system components, which leads to prolonged wait times by those desiring to place a call. Systems that are used to make call-routing decisions can be enhanced if scripting tools can be used in connection with those systems.
The call-routing systems of today do not offer an adequate level of scripting functionality that would otherwise translate to a more efficient call-routing system. Moreover, the interfaces used today are antiquated and do not provide a user-friendly, call-monitoring system. No prerouting of calls is provided in the current art, thereby adding increasing the time a caller must wait before being connected to an agent. Call-routing decisions are not made until after the call arrives at a telephony server.
The current state of the art could be improved by making call-routing and/or agent-assignment decisions prior to call arrival. The present state of the art could also be improved by providing a scripting tool that offers a high level of programmatic flexibility and utility to enhance the level of service offered to individuals with visual or hearing impairments. There is a further need for a system that monitors individual agents, agent availability, telephony statistics, and other resources available to fulfill communications requests. Finally, the current state of the art would benefit from a user interface that would allow an end user to monitor and make changes to a call-routing/agent-assignment systems.